Why we blog?

Here is the problem. When people ask us about our work in general, we tend to offer an answer focusing on what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is completely normal, because we think in terms of what and how most of the time when faced with a particular tasks. But it is understanding why you are doing it that is important when you want to communicate clearly what your intended impact is.

So more than anything else when preparing for the workshop, I was keen to pull together arguments for why engage in online advocacy in the first place, re-visiting the same question I had to answer over a year ago writing up the first version of the MRN communication strategy trying to make a case for an increase in our online work.

How does the why look like?

Let's use an example. Every organisation knows what they are doing. In our case of online advocacy the MRN staff writes commentaries on the current developments, which are posted on our and other websites as blogs.

We also know how to do this and have our own writing guidelines which are easy to follow and get to the gist of good online writing (anyone who has approached us to write for the Migration Pulse, would have received a copy).

But, my point is that even though you know the what and how, unless you have identified and thought about why you are doing all of this, little else makes sense.

What people forget is that blogging is just a tool. It is nothing more that writing down thoughts and opinions. And while I don't want to claim that every activity needs to be goal oriented (we have enough targets as it is), we need to face the fact that if the activity is to have any impact it needs to fit into the bigger picture. And here we return back to the why.

So back to the original question, “why blog?”  We can all agree that “everyone else is doing it” is just not a good enough reason, and neither is wanting to change the public perception of migration. Not because we wouldn't want to do that, but because this is a much broader outcome of all of our advocacy and communication activities, not just our blogging.

"Do it once, do it rights, then do it again"

The real why we identified here at MRN is because we believe that blogging

• produces easily accessible and timely data to inform discussions on migration - our blogs are regularly picked-up by news outlets and serve us much better than press releases when it comes to pro-active media work
• helps us reach new audiences - 65% of the readers we get on our website are new, while blogging for other websites reaches completely new networks
• opens a discussion and facilitates exchange of information, which we can feed back into our advocacy - our most commented blogs have over 100 comments, some providing helpful case studies
• helps us access new voices and perspectives - through our Migration Pulse blog we have had over 40 leading activies contrubute their opinions and experiences over the last year, many issues were later reported in the media (BBC, Guardian, etc.)

All of this has taught us that when planning our future strategy and thining of our work in terms of our goals, messages, audience, tools and evaluation, we always start with the why. If you need some help getting to the why, take a look at this great TED video by Simon Sinek. And if you like the TED format, you should definitely look into the TEDxEastEnd, which will focus on migration and is sponsored by MRN.

The why is something we keep revisiting here at MRN all the time, if only to stay true to our communications motto which says “Do it once, do it right, then do it again!”